Hi friends,
A few days ago, I posted the following on Twitter:
Thought to start the morning: It is never about HOW someone gets to their dream. It is about WHO they have to become in the process.
Soon after, I got a message from someone saying they understood this in theory, but would I please explain what this might look like in practice.
“I guess I have a somewhat vague idea of who I need to be in order to achieve my goals,” she wrote. “But how do I practice being this person? How do I make this shift?”
This is an excellent question, I’m sure you’ll agree.
And one that I asked for a long time before I realized that I’d already been implementing the answer.
I understood early on that the achievement of any goal was never simply about the myriad of steps and strategies you implemented to get there, but the personal growth you experienced along the way.
You can white-knuckle your way to your goals with systems.
Or you can evolve into the person for whom that goal is a given, second nature, and it arrives a lot easier.
It’s not only, as I wrote, about what you have to do.
It’s also about who you must become.
You pick a trait that you want to embody. And then you go about your day embodying that trait.
This won’t always be comfortable. Of course it won’t. Otherwise you’d already be that person.
But now you walk around in the world as if you already were.
If you want to be someone who’s always on top of things, then whenever you feel like putting something off, you say, no I’m a person who doesn’t put things off, and go from there.
When you sit down to write a query, don’t do it as the person who’s afraid it won’t sell. Write as though you already know that people will be falling over each other to say yes. Just decide that you’re a person people can’t say no to and write your queries from that place and that energy.
You pick one trait, and you become that person for ten minutes, and then when you’re comfortable embodying that trait for ten minutes, you stretch it longer and longer and longer.
You have to change the way you move around in the world, and your existing patterns and habits will repeatedly get in the way of that.
You have to shift them, break the current pattern, and this takes effort, it takes mindfulness, it takes a constant remembering that you are no longer that person.
And then you actually go be that person, that higher level of self, without the excuses.
It takes time. It takes practice.
And one day, without even noticing it, that’s just who you are now. It’s who you’ve become.
I decided one day that I was going to be someone who wrote fiction fast. And I acted from that place until I truly was.
I decided that I was someone who found it easy and effortless to run her business. And I acted from that place until I truly did.
I decided that I was going to be the writer who agents were eager to sign, and I didn’t send a single query letter until I had truly convinced myself that I was.
A mentor said to me early on, “You think you’ve started a business. But in actual fact, you’ve started a journey of personal and spiritual growth. Who you are now is not who you’ll be next year or next month, or even next week. You will become someone different. You might as well decide who you want to be when you get there and start practicing being that from today.”
It’s the best business advice I’ve ever received. And I love that I get to share it with you today.
Cheers,
Natasha